


Flight

by salifiable



Category: Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-21
Updated: 2008-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-25 03:09:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1628393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salifiable/pseuds/salifiable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Crake ascending and descending: snapshots chronicling his slow climb and blind fall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flight

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Helarctos

 

 

**Takeoff**

1.

Crake wakes up gradually, surfacing into consciousness like a bubble floating up from the depths of a lake. He blinks, sees the world around him in a blur of soft browns and mild grays. Someone his humming something nearby. He starts to get up, but the stab of pain in his right shoulder makes him fall back again, gasping for air as bursts of white explode in warning above his eyes.

The next time his vision clears, he sees Oryx leaning over him, an expression of gentle concern on her face; she has her pink ribbon threaded through her braided hair. The sight of her like this hurts him more deeply than he thought anything ever could.

"Crake," she says, her fingers a burning brand on his shoulder. "Crake, go back to sleep," she says-- and against all expectation, he does. The drift downwards is accompanied by humming once again, the tuneless song spiraling before him like a torch thrown into darkness.

\---

a.

Once upon a time, when Glenn was a small child, he had a heart as sweet and tender as just-baked caramel flan. He lived with his father and mother at a small house near the edge of the Helthwyzer West compound, a colonial with a porch that had a swing. Glenn would sometimes play on the swing, a creaky, splintery affair, but what he really loved was wandering around the forest that marked the far border of their backyard.

Years later, with the perspective gained by age and height, he would realize that what he had thought of as a forest was in reality nothing but a ragged grove of trees, a pond barely large than a puddle stagnating at the center. His mother told him later that it had been the previous inhabitants' attempt at a garden, although by the time Glenn's mother and father had moved in, all the plants had grown wild.

One early Saturday morning while his parents were still asleep, he had been playing among the trees when a darting flash of vivid green caught his eye. It turned out to be a translucently rubbery little creature that squirmed furiously in his hands when he captured it, and hopped around madly in the cookie jar after he ran into the kitchen to find something to trap it.

He'd stared at it, fascinated, until his mother had come down to see what all the ruckus was (he'd sort of knocked over more than half the kitchen over in his mad scramble up onto the counter, his parents kept the cookie jar pushed far back so he couldn't get to it easily), let out a stifled yelp, then gone to find his father.

HIs father had always been the one who had dealt best with Glenn, in those days. Before Jimmy, before Oryx.

His father had sat him down and explained that the animal that Glenn had caught was called a frog, but that he couldn't keep it in the house because the house wasn't a good place for it, that frogs had to live where there was water and green growing things. (The truth was that Glenn's mother didn't want a frog in the house, but at that point Crake was still at an age when adults felt easily justified in lying to him. Later, maybe their justifications became more convoluted, more nuanced, but they still lied to him all the same.)

After seeing Crake's face fall, his father had tried to cheer him up, saying that frogs-- natural frogs, whole frogs, ones that didn't have rat incisors or four sets of legs or eyes that could see infrared-- were really rare these days, and maybe Crake could build a cage out of twigs and leaves and mesh to keep the frog outside, to keep it safe.

And so that was exactly what Glenn had done, carefully leaving small cups of water in the enclosure, dropping mashed crickets and other insects that he himself had smacked enthusiastically into twitching pancakes. 

He went on the computer and looked up everything he could about the American Green Tree Frog, Phylum Chordata, Class Amphibia, Order Anura, Family Hylidae, Genus Hyla, Species cinerea. Subspecies Glenn's frog.

He learned that because amphibians were especially vulnerable to climate change, that with the rise in worldwide sea level thousands of amphibious species had been wiped out within the span of a few years, that the ones that were left had started sprouting all sorts of mutations, more like a mismatched jigsaw of squirmy gelatinous flesh than any sort of functional animal. The pictures that had popped up had Glenn gaping in fascinated horror, then closing the windows as quickly as he could and turning off the computer, as if those measure could single-handedly prevent his own frog meeting the same fate. (It's the remembrance of this-- the muscle memory of shivery fright, revulsion roiling in his stomach-- that makes him realize how young he really and truly must have been.)

Except that one day Glenn went out and saw that the cage he'd so carefully constructed had been violently torn apart, his frog nowhere to be seen. He stood there, gaping in disbelief, then ran forward, following the trail of matted grass.

He made a sharp turn around a scraggly tree, and there crouched a rakunk, chomping with gusto on Glenn's frog. Glenn started forward with a shout, but the rakunk snapped its head back, expertly tossing the rest of the limp body into the air and gulping it down whole before scampering away.

After the paralysis of disbelief broke, Glenn opened his mouth and cried. Wailed, sobbed, wept, as he stomped up to his room past his worried parents. He curled up on the bed and flooded snot and tears into his pillows until he felt positively light-headed.

It would be fair to say that between the time that Glenn heaved one last exhausted sob and the time he sat up and heaved himself off the bed, that he turned into another person entirely. A bildungsroman written in the space of three heartbeats, a boy turned into a man through the medium of a frog-- not through a kiss, but through a killing.

Later, Crake would use this moment as a convenient starting point for many things, for all things of importance in his life; not because it was, because events would soon occur that would lock the shape of Crake's life, force him into the trajectory he'd follow for the rest of his days (until the unexpected force that bears him upward an instant before impact, but that was something incalculable, unquantifiable; he cannot be held accountable for chaos).

But in hindsight, it was easy to assign whatever meaning he wished to this episode in his life, cramming it into whatever niche it conveniently fit in his personal narrative.

For example: the irony that Jimmy's beloved pet had been a rakunk, that its loss had seemed to amplify Jimmy's capacity for pathos, whereas Crake's parallel loss had drained him almost dry. 

For example: the lesson that it wasn't worth having faith in Nature, because as his father had explained, Nature meant that things ate and got eaten, but that you couldn't have faith in Man either, because men turned frogs into monsters and created rakunks and turned them loose and look at where that had ended up. 

For example: a recurring obsession with death, with extinction, with the end to all things.

For example: the fact that the world was obviously incapable of functioning properly on its own, and somebody had to step in to run it correctly. And if nobody else was going to do it, then it would have to be Crake.

\---

i.

SuSu knocked lightly on the door, then took a step back and waited. This Watson-Crick Institute, it was not the richest place she had ever seen, but it was comfortable with its richness. It did not try too hard to be rich, which was something SuSu wanted to learn; she had not come so far from roses and sewers that she could imagine wearing richness like she would wear a pair of old shoes.

The door opened, and SuSu looked up and saw a tall, dark-haired man with green eyes looking down at her. The first thought that went through her head was that she would not have thought a man like him would need a girl like her. Would pay for a girl like her. 

She bowed her head. "Sir, my name is SuSu, the agency has sent me here for you."

"Hm. Yes, well, come in." SuSu walked in, took off her shoes and placed them neatly beside the door. She saw him walk into another room, and after a moment she followed. It was a bedroom, a bed large enough for two people in the center, a closet to her left, not much other furniture in the room. But there was a thick carpet on the floor, though, thick enough that SuSu could curl her toes in it as she walked over and sat on the edge of the bed. 

The man had opened another door and gone into another room for the moment, so Susu took off the small silk coat she was wearing-- a shrug, the lady at the agency had called it-- and started to unzip her dress.

"Don't." She looked up to see the man leaning in the doorway, holding a piece of paper. He looked down at it, and then back up at her. SuSu felt embarrassed; maybe the man wanted to undress her, it was something many customers wanted. She put the shrug back on and sat quietly, eyes downcast. 

"No, look up." She did, startled; although many men had complimented her face, in her experience it was not the part of the body that they usually found the most interesting.

The man stared hard at her for a few minutes, long enough that Susu began to feel uncomfortable, a feeling she had not felt for a long time around her customers. He looked at her forehead, her eyes, her cheeks, her mouth, her chin. It was like she was a cow at market. Maybe he would ask her to act like a cow, and she almost giggled. It would not be the strangest thing a man had asked her to do.

But he was the strangest man she had ever been with, because after a few more moments the man moved over to the closet and took out a t-shirt and loose cotton pants, tossed them over to her. "Here, put these on." He said, walking over to the bed and getting under the covers. SuSu quickly stripped and put the clothes on, the fabric cool against her skin. She stood next to the bed, waiting to see if she should get in. The man pulled the covers aside a little, and so she climbed in. 

He rolled over to his side to face her, propping his head up on his arm to look at her again. She wondered for a moment if he was one of those customers who had never been with a woman before, but the agency would tell her if he was, and he did not touch her like a man who had not known women would touch her.

"I have a friend..." he said, and then was silent for so long that Susu thought maybe she should say something. 

But all she could think of were slow things to say; she knew she was not a slow person, not the way some of the other girls or men she had known were slow, but speaking in English made her slow, thinking in English even slower. It is good to have a friend, she wanted to say. I have never had a friend, except maybe my brother with the black tooth, she said silently. But I do not remember what he looks like except for his tooth, even though it is only twenty years ago, so maybe he was not a friend, she said in her head.

"I have a friend who thinks I have bad dreams at night," he said finally. "I want you to wake me up if I look like I'm having a bad dream." And then he turned over, turned off the light, and went to sleep. 

SuSu stared at the ceiling, surprised for the first time in a long time. This was too strange. All the men she had ever been with only wanted one thing. They maybe wanted it for different reasons, maybe they were unhappy, maybe they were happy and wanted to be happier, maybe they could not have the woman they wanted, maybe they had a woman they did not want, but it did not matter too much to Susu because it was all the same to her in the end. 

But if this man did not want what all men had wanted from her, then what was it that he really did want?

It was too confusing. SuSu sighed, and decided to go to sleep. This bed was more comfortable than most of the ones she had slept in, especially since the sheets were all dry.

She woke up suddenly a few hours later. Someone was shouting, yelling next to her. SuSu sat up, tried touching the man's shoulder. He moved away, and he was still shouting. Susu grabbed his shoulder and starting shaking the man. He turned away violently, enough to wrench her wrist. 

SuSu got out of bed and went over to the man's side of the bed. She turned on the lamp, and then took hold of his face, and slapped him across the cheek.

"Wake up!" she screamed. "Wake up, you silly child!" she screamed in his ear, and she realized in the second surprise of the night that she was speaking in in her native tongue. Not English, not Thai, but the language her mother had spoken to her. The language she thought she had forgotten long ago.

The man's eyes snapped open, shining shining green. He immediately blinked and turned away from the lamp light. SuSu could hear him breathing in big gasps. She knelt beside him, stroked the hair off his forehead.

"What were you dreaming of?" She asked him, remembering to speak in English. He shook his head. Susu put her hand on his cheek and turned him to face her.

"What is it that you want, sir?" She asked. The man laughed, a strange laugh.

"Trexler knew what he wanted and what, in general, all men wanted, and he was glad in a way that it was inexpressible and unattainable. He was satisfied to remember that it was deep, formless, enduring and impossible of fulfillment." He said in a low voice, then put his hand over her hand, pulled it away from his cheek and kissed it.

And then SuSu knew, knew without a doubt, what it was that the man really wanted, and that he wanted what all great men had always wanted: he wanted to change the world. 

Not save the world, not the way her mother had saved her own small world by selling SuSu to Uncle En, the type of salvation that allowed only the world to keep going as it has always gone, the miserable always miserable, the suffering still suffering. No. This man would change the world, take the wheel of life and turn it into a bullet train, a rocket, a shooting star.

"Sorry," the man said, dropping her hand. "Call me-- call me Crake."

"Yes, si-- yes, Crake." SuSu turned off the light and went back to her side of the bed. She was drifting off to sleep when she heard him whisper, "Thank you."

In the morning Crake took from her what every other man had taken from her before. But, SuSu thought as his hands began to move over her body, maybe this time it was more freely given.

***

**Descent**

2.

The next time Crake wakes, he stays awake. The soft browns and mild grays resolve themselves into beams of what look like real wood above him. He sits up, gingerly, realizes that he's on a cot in some sort of cabin.

"So, you're awake." Crake turns his head and sees, with a shock, Jimmy sitting in the corner of the room.

"What-- Why am I still alive?" He asks. This is not how it's supposed to go. Jimmy grins at him, although there's very little humor in it.

"Too slow on the draw, Crake." Crake snorts and grinds the heels of his palms into his eyelids. If Jimmy doesn't want to answer him, then Crake won't push it.

"All right," he says, his voice a little muffled. "You already know what I'm going to ask the basics, so just tell me already." A pause, and then Jimmy starts.

"Well, I remembered what you told me about the pleebland vaccine, that it worked against JUVE, so I told MaddAddam to take some of my blood and go at it. They still had the BlyssPluss pills, so they had the pathogen, used it to figure what the fuck you put in that vaccine. Took'em about a two and half weeks to reverse-engineer it, and getting it distributed took another couple weeks. Things have mostly settled by now, though. Probably about, say, a quarter million people left in the world." Crake swallowed.

"Anyways, almost everywhere was trashed with the rioting and everything, so Oryx and I tried to figure out where to send everybody. You remember the Montanaro scandal a few years ago? Multi-billionaire that got converted by God's Gardeners, started buying up all the land reserves and national parks around the world? Well, the ones that were still worth a damn, anyways." Crake raises an eyebrow.

"He got most of them, if I remember correctly." Jimmy snorts.

"Yeah, big international outcry, but Montanaro kept upping the prices until governments, corporations, private owners, everybody caved. So, eventually people forget about it after a while, but you know what he's actually been doing? Turning everything he's bought into ecospheres, basically wrapping up all that land all over the world in these big bubbles, throws a fortune away on each one to clean them of 'unnatural influences', which basically translates into getting rid of every blessed splice walking, flying, or growing on that land. Probably the eventual plan was to move all of God's Gardeners into'em, but, uh, those plans got a little interrupted. Anyways, guess who built those big bubbles for Montanaro? They're made of the same mussel-silicon-dendrite whatever you had at Paradice, so you get three guesses and the first two don't count."

Crake blinks, mouth hanging open a little. It alway takes him off guard, the fact that there are things that he doesn't know, has no idea about. "Rejoov."

"Bingo. So, MaddAddam hacked the records to get the coordinates, and we broadcasted the coordinates of each the bubbles over the radio, the tv, whatever frequency we could get our hands on, put it on loop."

"Is that where we are now? One of Montanaro's domes?"

"Yeah. Guy was kind of a nut, he named each of them after some type of heaven. Guess he took a leaf out of your book with Paradice. Anyways, Yellowstone turned into Neverland, some park in China got turned into Shangri-la, that sort of thing. If you want to know where we are now..." Jimmy arches an eyebrow. 

"Think apples, that's all I'm saying. Or I guess one apple in particular." He looks at Crake expectantly. "That clear everything up for you? I actually gotta get back out while there's still sun, all this living natural is hard work."

Crake nods, lies back down. His head is starting to spin. Then a thought hits him-- "Wait, Jimmy, what about the Crakers?" Crake asks, twisting his body upwards.

Jimmy pauses in the doorway, the frame silhouetting him in sunlight.

"You can't play God, Crake. I'm not letting you remake humanity in your image. What's left of us now deserves another spin." He turns and walks away, shutting the door and leaving Crake in darkness.

\---

b.

Crake didn't know whether the higher-ups at Rejoov thought he was a moron or what. Well, obviously not a moron, otherwise they wouldn't have built Paradice for him and given him a lab group of mad scientists to direct. But this was ridiculous; they gave him all the numbers, projections, statistics, all the data they were going to use to promote BlyssPluss, the Crakers. 

The erosion of topsoil; the depletion of fossil fuels; the degradation of air quality; the diseases and blight raging rampant; the disappearance of species after species, until future generations were going to think that biodiversity was some sort of human resources policy for hiring. 

Crake supposed it made sense to hype up a sense of doom and gloom if you were going to try to market an entirely new species of human (BlyssPluss would've sold itself, why they apportioned an advertising budget for it made no sense whatsoever), but this was like trying to sell somebody air-conditioning when their house was on fire. All of the data led to one glaring, inevitable conclusion that it seemed everybody except Crake was ignoring:

Humanity was fucked.

For someone who had spent most of his life not caring in the least what happened to other people, Crake had spent a couple months in what was his version of a blind panic; that was, he ran the simulations and projections thousands, millions of times, adding and deleting parameters, changing initial conditions, changing later conditions, tweaking the code over and over again. 

But it always came out the same way: in ten years, at most twenty, humans were going to die, and they were going to take all of earth's life with it, drowning plants, animals, fungi in a toxic morass of poisoned gas and filthy water. Even bacteria were going to have trouble in a world where the atmosphere became so smoggy that sunlight attenuation would hit 70%.

After the last simulation finished running-- in desperation, Crake had told the computer to simulate what would happen if the whole world gave up electronics and went vegan tomorrow ad infinitum, which was of course an absurd assumption; in the face of certain death, people just might switch to eating rabbit food, but they certainly weren't going to give up internet porn-- Crake sat back, resigned.

All right. All right. Rejoov didn't have it entirely wrong, what with making BlyssPluss a sterilization pill on top of all its other features. The problem was that sterilization was too slow; even if they distributed BlyssPluss as widely as possible tomorrow, 100% sterilization in all the pills, there would still be too many people breathing, drinking, shitting, taking up space, air, water. 

There were currently 42 billion people alive on the planet, and only a few million people away from complete and utter meltdown. What was really needed, what was really necessary, was for there to be _less people right now._

Crake moved back to the computer, brought up another database with a few quick keystrokes. He'd need something with a short incubation time, highly contagious, optimal virulence. He'd have to be careful about seeding the disease, too; it would have to hit everywhere all at once, an earthquake with dozens of epicenters. Put in some sort of time-lapse factor to get BlyssPluss evenly distributed, then pull the trigger.

He began to put the pieces in place, one by one. Using MaddAddam as pawns was a little tricky, especially since a few of them had the annoying tendency to ask too many questions. Crake disposed of them as quickly and as quietly as he could, he wondered briefly if he ought to feel disturbed, feel guilt, feel grief, feel something-- but then he decided that this lack of feeling was beneficial, really, considering the ultimate scale of the game he was really playing. (Assigning Oryx to market the pills in the pleeblands caused a bigger twinge.)

In the end, putting the plan together turned out to be more of an exercise in patience than anything; manifold pieces to manipulate, true, but nothing too intellectually demanding, just a question of a few dropped hints, a few firm nudges, a few rearranged research agendas-- like waiting for dominoes standing in a pool of syrup to fall after the initial push.

This left Crake with too much to time to concoct justifications for his actions, reasoning away what was unreasonable, imagining what the rest of the world had thus far found unimaginable. 

_Argument 1: It was humanity who fucked the planet over, it was fitting that it would be humanity alone that got fucked. If he didn't intervene, it wasn't just humans shuffling off this mortal coil, it was the birds and the bees, the flowers and the trees, the cats and the dogs, the fish and the frogs. Especially the frogs._

(This was the only argument that even approached the neighborhood of sanity, and yet whenever Crake articulated it, it still sounded crazy. This was not promising.)

_Argument 2: He was finishing the work that his mother and Uncle Pete had left unfinished, the task they'd started but left incomplete when they murdered his dad. Helthwyzer thought it had an elegant concept of a business model, hm? It thought it was acting for the general good, did it? Well, they'd gotten halfway there, except they'd miscalculated the economics of scarcity, and they'd entirely discounted the economies of scale. All Crake was doing was taking their elegant concept and making it bigger and better than ever. He was following the argument to its logical conclusion._

(Crake was not fond of this line of argument. It made his entire life sound like a prolonged, thwarted exercise in Hamletism.)

_Argument 3: Hell was other people. Quod erat demonstrandum._

(Crake was fond of this line of argument. It was pithy, made him sound well-read, and tickled his sense of irony since he ran Paradice.) 

On the whole, Crake thought he was handling the whole thing fairly well, until he lay staring at the ceiling one night and realized he hadn't slept for more than two hours at a time for the past month, even the nights Oryx came by to wear him out. He switched on the light, padded over to his study, and took a book down from a shelf. He flipped to the first page: 

_No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing._

After his mother died, Helthwyzer High had coerced Crake into a session of grief counseling, even a month before graduation. At the end of the session, the counselor had urged him to take a book from one of her office shelves, saying that literature might help Crake work through his mourning (since talk therapy obviously wasn't doing the trick, she seemed to say silently). Crake had picked one at random, and later read a few pages when he'd had nothing else to do. He remembered reading that particular passage, and that it had meant nothing to him, held no relevance for his own experience. 

In retrospect, he realized that this was because he had already finished mourning his mother; he had been grieving slowly for her ever since his father died, the moment she began her long, slow decay. He stopped grieving her when there wasn't enough of her left to grieve, not enough that he could recognize as his mother as she had been. (The time constant of grief. The exponential decay of life after heart-rending loss.)

But now the words did ring true, somehow. Except the part about not being afraid.

Crake put the book back on the shelf and went back to bed. He would look Jimmy up tomorrow, see what cork-nut had gotten up to these past few years.

But if grief was like fear, then love was like rage. Crake got Jimmy working for Paradice with hardly any effort, not that it was hard to see why, considering the dump Jimmy had been living in. And for the first few days, things were pretty good; Crake had always been fonder of Jimmy than logic would suggest. After all, the man was an emotionally insecure, psychologically immature sex addict who was a slow thinker.

But Jimmy could also be genuinely, sincerely funny, and he was also perhaps the only person who had ever called Crake on any of his bullshit-- although, granted, the vast majority of Crake's bullshit went entirely over Jimmy's head. 

It was easy to put on an act around Jimmy, easy to pull on the skin of loyal Rejoov employee, mad scientist toeing the company line in order to create a more perfect world. (As if tweaking genes and splicing code could ever really solve any of humanity's problems. As if the Crakers were actually human at all. Rejoov and Nature had found the same solution to solving humanity's problems, and the solution was to do away with humanity altogether.)

Observing Jimmy had also been a reasonably good way for Crake to figure out how normal human beings thought and interacted, because as it turned out, most human beings were emotionally insecure, psychologically immature sex addicts who were slow thinkers. Remembering how Jimmy acted or reacted in different situations had often proved useful for Crake, particularly when he'd been teaching himself to manipulate people.

Which was why the dramatic irony almost killed him when he took Jimmy to meet Oryx for the first time, and he'd realized at a glance that Jimmy was still head over heels in love with her-- because Crake had learned that from Jimmy. 

He'd fallen in love with Oryx while imitating Jimmy's previous fall during high school; counterfeit become real, art become life, the gazer become the abyss.

It hadn't been intentional. That day when Crake and Jimmy had been watching HottTotts, if Crake had been watching himself he would've let the broadcast slide right on by, the little girls just another perversion in a deeply perverted world. But the strength and intensity of the emotion on Jimmy's face at the sight of that girl-- the girl who would later become Oryx-- had made Crake pause, print the image out. (Jimmy had an abysmal poker face, although he himself didn't seem to realize it. But every emotion showed clearly, as if Jimmy were a pane of glass.) 

It was the memory of that emotion that had made Crake use the image as his gateway for Extinctathon. 

It was curiosity about the fierceness of that emotion that had made him go to Student Services, clutching that picture in his hand.

But then, somehow, gradually, Crake had found himself wanting Oryx for his own sake-- an inexplicable fascination with her fathomless smile, an obsession with letting her silken hair fall through his fingers like a waterfall, a fixation on threading her ribbons through her hair as she braided it deftly, a passion for the graceful curve of her neck.

Crake was not terribly experienced with lust, let alone love-- he'd had sex with other girls, but it had always been a clinical experience, the girls wanting it, panting for it while he stared at the ceiling. But Jimmy's arrival had created an untenable triangle, brought enlightenment to Crake in the form of suffering (Guatama Siddhartha, this was not how it was supposed to go).

Untenable, but even untenable situations could be held for at least a little while; and so Crake hid his own feelings while Jimmy failed utterly. Crake made veiled but pointed conversation with Jimmy, conversation that was ostensibly about the Crakers but which was really about envy and want and desire, about territory and misaligned hormones. 

Jimmy reacted about as poorly as one might've predicted (although it was patently clear that Jimmy had no idea what Crake was really talking about).

Crake could remember having a conversation with Jimmy that ran along similar lines back when Jimmy was at Martha Graham, except the discussion had been more general and Crake's conclusion then had been that the solution to all romantic misery was guilt-free promiscuity. Crake still believed that, in the abstract at least, enough so that he wasn't going to change the blueprint of the Crakers, but he found it wasn't something he could personally take from theory to practice. All Crake wanted now was for Jimmy to acknowledge that Oryx belonged to Crake-- Crake had gotten to her first, and so he had dibs, goddammit. (Love was rage: the hot flush up through the neck into the face, the fast breathing, the pounding heartbeat. Or was this jealousy?)

And throughout it all, Oryx did nothing, said nothing to commit herself irrevocably either way (perhaps she was unaware that there was a choice to be made?). Crake knew the moment, the instant that Oryx stepped into Jimmy's room and seduced him, but Oryx kept coming back to him too, let him run his hands through her hair again and again. It was extraordinary that both of them thought he didn't know, but he held his tongue. 

Perhaps he could have stopped the affair between Oryx and Jimmy by speaking, but to do so when Oryx said nothing seemed to be cheating, somehow. But then, perhaps he couldn't have.

It was what it was: Jimmy and Crake were both in love with Oryx, but it didn't seem that she loved either of them back.

So Crake turned his attention back to his original intractable problem. Most of the pieces of his plan were in place, put together in an appropriate fashion. The problem was in the fine-tuning. There was a fine line between wiping out most of humanity and wiping out all of humanity: too many variables he couldn't see, couldn't control-- how much rioting there would be, the kinds of emergency measures different governments would impose, whether or not people facing death would cling together or scatter away.

Probably the virus wouldn't wipe out all of humanity on its own, even the most virulent viruses never achieved 100% fatality rates; but the chaos and violence that would accompany humanity's last throes might do away with those who would have been natural survivors, or it might make the earth unlivable for those who did make it through humanity's dying convulsions.

And Crake already knew he'd made a huge mistake in developing a vaccine for the virus as his own private side project; even if the general public didn't link the virus to Crake, Rejoov certainly would, and Crake had no illusions that he would be able to withhold the formula for very long once the Corpsecorps got serious about making him tell. The problem was that they would almost certainly make him spill the beans too early, get the answer out of him before the virus did away with enough of the world's population. 

He might be able to hold out long enough that there'd be a sizeable reduction in the world's population, but that would only mean that they'd all be facing the exact same problem in a century's time; a postponement of catastrophe, not a cure.

Crake walked over to the window, pressed his forehead against the glass. He was tired beyond belief.

Well. If humanity died out, then that was out of his control. It might be a fitting fuck-you if Crake let the Crakers loose after it was all done, after all, let the new and improved beta version 2.0 have a chance among the smoking ruins. He was fond of them. It might be worth it to see what sort of non-sexist, non-racist, sin-free sort of civilization they'd come up with. See whether they could heal the planet in ways God's Gardeners could only have dreamed of. Crake grinned suddenly; he'd set up Jimmy as their caretaker, the irony was too delicious to resist. The meek would inherit the earth, but they'd have a sex-addicted dumbass as their executor.

And as for the vaccine... he'd just have to take whatever measures necessary to ensure that Rejoov didn't get their hands on the formula. Destroy all remaining samples of the vaccine, of course, but if he had to take more drastic measures, then so be it. Crake closed his eyes. But if it came to that, he was taking Oryx with him. If grief was fear, then love was sorrow. Love was selfish. Love was stupid.

He knew that he should probably write a letter, record a video, do something to leave some explanation for the survivors for what he had done; at the very least, if he kept to his plan then he certainly owed an explanation to Jimmy-- but what was the use, really?

He'd already flapped his butterfly wings, set into motion a trajectory that was already triggering storm warnings left and right, so what was the point of shouting into the tornado?

\---

ii.

Oryx sat at Crake's bedside. The Rejoov doctor had said that Crake had to be put in a coma so the bleeding inside his head could heal, and that it would be better for Crake's shoulder too, and so the doctor had set up a medicine drip to keep Crake asleep.

It was good to see someone asleep. Someone at peace and still alive. Oryx had been working with Jimmy for the past couple of weeks with very little sleep at all, trying to think of what they should do and making everybody in the compound do what Oryx and Jimmy told them to do. Oryx thought that everyone was glad that someone was telling them what to do, and so it was not as difficult as she might have thought.

"Well, MaddAddam's almost done with the vaccine, so we can start packing it onto the helicopters the moment they're finished." Jimmy dropped into the chair next to her, running hand over his face. "We'll have to think of someplace to put all of the survivors, unless we want everybody who survived JUVE to get eaten by wolvogs and pigoons."

Oryx looked over at him as she pulled her chair closer to Crake's bed. Jimmy had surprised her; before this, she would not have thought that Jimmy was able of acting the way he had, of taking charge of all those people and thinking of all those ideas. Oryx smiled at Jimmy; she was glad that she was here to help him.

Oryx turned back to Crake, carefully taking his still hand in hers, the one on his good arm. She ran her thumb over his knuckles. One, two, three, four.

"I ought to kill him." Oryx looked back at Jimmy in surprise. He was staring at Crake, and he looked angry enough to kill. Jimmy shifted his gaze to her, his gaze hard. "Don't you think I should kill him?"

Oryx sighed, looking at Crake. 

If Jimmy had asked her right after she had woken up, or even a few days ago, before she'd seen Crake's notes and computer files, before she'd thought about what Crake was really trying to do, really trying to achieve--then she probably would have said yes.

Oryx brought Crake's hand up to her face for a moment, laid it flat against her cheek; his fingers between her fingers, the back of his hand against her palm.

"Oryx," Jimmy said, his voice cracking. He sounded wrecked. "I'm asking you to choose, here. For keeps."

Oryx turned back to look at him; she had cried for the first time in her life two weeks ago, when she learned what BlyssPluss really was. It was possible that this would be the second time. Oryx tried to smile at Jimmy, but it was difficult.

"Jimmy," she said. "Jimmy, I can't leave Crake. I said I would never leave Crake." And now there was the taste of salt, the sensation of liquid sliding down her face.

Jimmy was terrifyingly still for a moment. Then he stood up swiftly, and Oryx saw with a jolt that he was holding a spraygun in his right hand. But before she could register more than surprise, he turned and strode away.

"Jimmy, where are you going?" Oryx called after him.

"Maybe I can't kill him, but I can kill his children."

And she almost ran after him-- but she had said that she wouldn't leave Crake, she had just said she couldn't.

Oryx bent her head, and wept, and held on.

***

**Go-around**

iii.

"So what do you think?" Jimmy said, setting the last of the luggage on the floor. Oryx looked around; wood floors, wood walls, wood ceiling. It would get very cold in here at night, she hoped that the blankets they had brought would be enough. She walked over to the window, pulled aside a thin curtain to look outside. Already the bare outline of a field, already decisions about crops and planting times to be made.

She let the curtain fall back, almost-forgotten memories of thatched huts and rice paddies resurfacing. Oryx looked over at the cot in the corner, where Crake was still sleeping. There hadn't been any beds in the cabin, only four or five cots folded in one corner and a couple thin mattresses rolled up in another. She would be sleeping on the floor, and that brought back even more memories, earlier ones. 

Even after how far she had traveled, even after all she had seen and done, it still came back to this. But Oryx found that she was not unhappy.

Crake moved slightly, his blanket slipping a little. Oryx went over to him and pulled it up again. The doctor said that once there was no more medicine dripping into him, he would wake up soon, but the doctor also said it would be good if he would sleep as much as possible. She smoothed Crake's hair back, an echo of the same gesture she'd made so long ago; what was it she'd thought, then? A bullet train, a rocket, a shooting star. She smiled at his sleeping face. But life was still a wheel, after all, after everything. He hadn't changed that in the end.

"It"s fine," Oryx said, looking up at Jimmy. He had come over to stand next to the other side of the bed, and was looking down at Oryx and Crake with an unreadable expression.

Oryx smiled up at him.

"I think we will survive," she said, and like her smile her words lit up the air beyond the confines of the cabin, brought a lasting though intangible brightness to people on the other side of the world.

\---

c.

Crake punched in the airlock code, cursed when it didn't open. He hit the video intercom, waited until Jimmy's image came up.

"What are you doing?" he said. "Open up."

"I'm following Plan B," said Jimmy. "In the event of a bio attack, don't let anybody in. Your orders. I've sealed the airlock."

"Anybody didn't mean me," said Crake. "Don't be a cork-nut."

"How do I know you're not a carrier?" said Jimmy.

"I'm not."

"How do I know that?"

"Let's just suppose," said Crake wearily, "that I anticipated this event and took precautions." Oh, the irony, the irony. Knife in his hand, knives in his mouth. "Anyway, you're immune to this."

"Why would I be?"

"The antibody serum was in the pleeb vaccine. Remember all those times you shot up with that stuff? Every time you went to the pleebs to wallow in the mud and drown your lovesick sorrows."

"How did you know?" said Jimmy. "How did you know where I, what I wanted?" Crake stifled the urge to roll his eyes. This would be what Jimmy would latch onto. Typical.

"Don't be a moron. Let me in."

The door opened, and Crake staggered toward the inmost door.

"Where were you?" said Jimmy. "Have you been in a fight?"

"You have no idea," said Crake. "Now let me in."

"Where's Oryx?"

"She's right here with me. She's had a hard time."

"What happened to her? What's going on out there? Let me talk to her!"

"She can't talk right now. I can't lift her up. I've had a few injuries. Now quit fucking the dog and let us in."

A pause, and then the door swung open. Jimmy was standing there, his spraygun aimed directly at Crake's heart. Crake swallowed. This was better than he could have imagined, could have planned. Crake let Oryx fall backwards over his left arm. He looked at Jimmy, a direct look, unsmiling.

"I'm counting on you," Crake said, and began to slit her throat.

Except the one time it really mattered, Jimmy was faster than Crake. The knife in Crake's right hand had barely broken skin when agony exploded in his right shoulder, a blast of shattered bone and surging blood. Crake staggered sideways, his head slamming into the wall of the airlock. But he still managed to hold on to Oryx, still managed to keep her with him even as he was falling, even as he fell.

\---

3.

Crake recovers slowly. Oryx works outside, planting the seeds the Jimmy brings in the small patch of cleared land in front of the cabin. Jimmy drops in from time to time to help Oryx with the heavy lifting, although he doesn't come by very often; he's too busy making sure that the other Montanaro domes have enough seeds and planting supplies and other provisions to become self-sufficient. Some of the domes need more, some can get by with less; the number of people in the Montanaro domes ranges from a few dozen to over three hundred, except for Eden.

Here, there's only Oryx and Crake, and sometimes Jimmy.

Jimmy's pulled everybody at Rejoov who'd worked on the mechanics of the Montanaro domes and sent a couple of them to each of the ones that were inhabited now: one person to work as a climate engineer so people aren't trying to grow plums in an Arctic winter or cranberries in a savanna summer, and one person to work as a mechanical engineer to make sure that the solar power kept working, that air and water and sunlight got through the dome in sufficient quantities.

There aren't any Rejoov engineers here at Eden, but Crake thinks he knows why; Oryx has told him the story she and Jimmy thought up to tell what was left of Rejoov, that Crake had developed a vaccine for JUVE but he'd only managed to make one or two stable batches that Jimmy had used up, and so he'd destroyed his old notes and was working on a better vaccine for JUVE when the epidemic hit. It's not the strongest cover story in the world, and Jimmy and Oryx probably don't want to test it if they don't have to; Crake appreciates this, he thinks.

Crake gradually becomes strong enough to help Oryx with the gardening, pulling weeds and watering tender green shoots. He finds his life approaching something dangerously close to idyllic. In his quieter moments he thinks to himself, I don't deserve this, and the thought leaves him breathless and he has to sit down.

One night he wakes up breathless from a dream he cannot remember, but he doesn't think this is the same dream as his old ones; there is a lingering bittersweetness at the back of his mouth, instead of the usual sourness of fear.

He sits up and looks over at Oryx; she lies still, still asleep. Definitely not the same dream as the ones he had before, then.

He leaves his cot as quietly as he can, puts on a coat and sneaks outside, closing the door gently behind him. He looks up; starlight does come through the material of the dome, although diffuse and faint; snowflakes instead than pinpoints of luminescence.

Crake sits on the ground crosslegged, gazes up at the sky.

"Hey." Crake turns, sees Jimmy standing behind him. The other man comes forward, drops down next to him.

"How's everything going?" Crake asks. Jimmy shrugs.

"Okay. Things are going okay." He doesn't elaborate. 

Crake studies him, this man who is now, in all practical terms, the salvation of humanity. This best and only friend whom Crake never really knew at all. But then, Jimmy could say the same of Crake.

"You know this can't last," Crake says, gesturing around him. "I mean, you can't keep delivering supplies to everybody, and eventually people are going to outgrow what the Montanaro domes can support." Jimmy was silent for a moment, then sighed.

"I know. I'll probably give it a few more months, let people have the full year. Have them go through at least one full planting and harvesting cycle, get used to it before they start living in the wild." Crake pressed his mouth into a flat line.

"Yeah, and then what? Start the whole thing over, is that the idea? Begin building civilization from scratch, from the ground up?" Crake can feel his head start pounding, although he has no idea why he's getting angry. (Or is this grief? Maybe it's fear.) "We've had this conversation before, Jimmy-- all it takes is the elimination of one generation and it's game over." Jimmy shrugs, a maddening grin on his face.

"So we start a new game. And not all's lost-- this master brewer survived, he's living in Avalon over in Europe, I talked to him the other day. We still got beer, I say we're going be okay." The grin fades as Jimmy's expression become serious. "There are about a thousand inhabited Montanaro domes right now, one of them has to get it right this time around. Infinite monkey theorem."

Crake snorts, this blatant abuse of mathematics intensifying the pounding in his ears.

"Crake, don't be rude," Oryx scolded, coming over and sitting next to both of them to complete the triangle. "Have some faith in Jimmy." Crake snorts again, louder.

"I don't know what that is."

Oryx shakes her head, takes Crake's left hand in her right, holds on tight. "This is faith."

"What, this?" Crake retorts, although he can feel his hand trembling in hers. "And what would you call desperation, then? What would you call a Hail Mary pass? Is this hope? Is this what's going to save us?" He sees Oryx catch hold of Jimmy's right hand with her left, an instant after he feels Jimmy reach out his left hand to grasp Crake's still weak right hand, Jimmy's warm fingers lacing through Crake's shivering ones. Threefold cord, still unbroken.

"Yeah," Jimmy says. "This, and--"

***

Notes:

[1] Crake quotes E.B. White's short story "The Second Tree from the Corner" in section i, when he replies to Oryx's question about what he wants.

[2] The book Crake reads from in section b is "A Grief Observed", by C.S. Lewis.

 


End file.
